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Date:         Wed, 16 Apr 1997 10:29:11 +0200
From: Rolf Marvin B|e Lindgren <r.m.b.lindgren@USIT.UIO.NO>
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Subject:      Re: Alternatives to LaTeX (Was Some comments...)
Status: R

[Marcel Oliver]

| it is unlikely that postscript versions of the EC fonts will appear
| any time soon---bad for web based TeX publishing, and for every
| commercially available font someone will have to at least T1-reencode
| it, which I guess is not a triviality.  So TeX users will always lag
| behind in the choice of fonts they can use (if they want to avoid
| running into the non- hyphenation stupidity).

using Alan Jeffrey's fontinst package, and the utilities that are
included with these, converting PostScript fonts to TeX fonts is not
very difficult - at least not for text fonts.  using a script that I
hacked myself, I was able to convert the entire Adobe PostScript font
collection to TeX fonts.

I won't make this available to the public until I'm sure that the fonts
behave correctly.  however, somebody who knows more about fonts than I
might want to convert the lot and make it available to CTAN.

what bugs me more about LaTeX is the following, which has made me
consider alternatives, since I think any decent typsetting program
should offer it:

                a) the ability to typset lines to a grid
                b) footnotes set to the bottom of current column

a) might be solved by adding an increment option to the skip commands,
so that TeX will skip along specified, discrete intervals.

b) is possible using the twocolumn mode that comes with LaTeX, but not
with the otherwise more versatile multicol package.